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TELEVISION/RADIO; Now Mom and Dad Are Going Cartoon-Crazy, Too

ONE thing was certain: Linda Simensky loved the sheep. And the French fries weren't bad, either. ''Mo pitched us an idea, and it was so silly and so funny, we just laughed,'' recalled Ms. Simensky, vice president of original animation for the Cartoon Network. ''And they served us French fries. Hardly anyone feeds you during a pitch, but it's a good idea.''

Over that plate of pommes frites in June 1998, a baa-ing cartoon character took his first tentative steps toward stardom. His name: Sheep. His creator: Mo Willems, a New York University film major and onetime downtown performance artist who had a dream of taking an animated wool-bearer out of the barnyard and into the limelight.

Fast-forward almost two years to a bustling studio in SoHo, where the 32-year-old Mr. Willems and a phalanx of artists, writers and computer types are now churning out the storyboards for the first 13 episodes of ''Sheep in the Big City,'' which is to bow on the Cartoon Network this fall. The irony-laden animated series, starring a nonverbal sheep who escapes from a farm and finds a laughably affordable apartment in a nice neighborhood, is the latest to get approval from the network, which is not only home to such original series as ''Johnny Bravo,'' ''Dexter's Laboratory'' and ''The Powerpuff Girls'' but is also one of the hottest networks on cable.

''Mo is a writer for 'Sesame Street': that's the 'Saturday Night Live' for preschoolers,'' Ms. Simensky said. ''The people coming out of there are the Dr. Seusses of our day. My rule is, someone shows up from 'Sesame Street,' work with them. They're funny under all sorts of circumstances.''

The Simensky rule pretty much sums up the ethos of the cannily successful Cartoon Network: find people who write funny and draw funny, and let them loose on America's children. The formula has worked so well that a network that started eight years ago as a kind of jukebox of animated golden oldies, running a never-ending cycle of ''The Flintstones'' and ''The Jetsons,'' has evolved into a supplier of some of the most innovative new animation on television.

In 1999, for instance, the 24-hour channel, now in some 62 million American homes, saw the largest increase in viewers of any channel on the cable box, making it the third-highest-rated advertiser-supported network on cable. And while the channel is exceedingly popular with young viewers -- 8 of the top 10 shows on cable for children ages 2 to 11 were on the Cartoon Network -- it also has surprising traction among adults: nearly a third of its viewers are grown-ups.

The vitality of that adult audience was underscored on April 1, when the Cartoon Network began operating a spinoff channel, Boomerang. Network officials say it is intended to appeal to baby boomers through a steady diet of reruns of boomer favorites like ''Popeye,'' ''Top Cat'' and ''Quick Draw McGraw.''

That an all-cartoon channel could make such a splash in the highly competitive, narrow-casting kingdom of cable is a testament to the explosion of imagination that animation in movies and television has unleashed over the past decade. With the prime-time successes of animated programs on Fox, and the stream of feature-length releases by studios like Disney and DreamWorks, there is what amounts to a new cartoon cachet. ''The Simpsons,'' ''King of the Hill'' and ''Futurama'' rank among the most consistently funny sitcoms on television; ''Rocky and Bullwinkle,'' ''Bugs Bunny'' and ''The Flintstones,'' once regarded as pop-cultural flotsam, are now viewed as classics by a generation of young animators who are reinvigorating the form.

''I would say we are in the best period for animation since the 40's or 50's,'' said Ms. Simensky, a cartoon fanatic whose other television infatuation is the Weather Channel. (''It's really just a cartoon map of the United States with clouds moving.'')

Spanning the dial, the cartoon spectrum is probably more varied than at any time in television history. It ranges from ''Scooby-Doo'' (on the Cartoon Network) to ''South Park'' (on Comedy Central), from ''The Rugrats'' (Nickelodeon) to ''Daria'' (MTV). Along the way, there have been some notable misfires: just last month, for instance, NBC canceled a critically scorched animated series in prime time, ''God, the Devil and Bob,'' after only a few episodes.

''The networks aren't sure where animation fits in their lineups,'' said Ms. Simensky, who came to the Cartoon Network from Nickelodeon. ''It really varies depending on the passion of the executives in charge. Animation is a huge commitment because it's really time consuming and it's really expensive.'' The cost of a half-hour series starts at something like $500,000 an episode.

Alone among child-centric cable channels like Nickelodeon, Fox Family and Disney, the Cartoon Network is devoted entirely to the whimsy of the pen and pixel; the network is so cartoon-crazy that it recently ran a mock presidential campaign, featuring Bob Dole and other flesh-and-blood politicians, endorsing the cartoon candidacies of characters like Daffy Duck and Space Ghost. (Scooby-Doo won the viewer write-in contest.)

''Fantasy storytelling in general is really booming right now,'' said Betty Cohen, who has been the president of the Cartoon Network since its inception in 1992. ''People are getting used to not working within the constraints of live action. That's why you're seeing 30 percent of our audience being adults. Once animated stopped being relegated to Saturday morning, it became O.K. to be a cartoon person, whether you're an adult or a teenager.''

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But what genuinely confers identity on a television network is the new material that it beams into homes. Having put on the air a passel of original series, like ''Ed, Edd n Eddy,'' about three teenage boys growing up, and ''Johnny Bravo,'' featuring a buffoonish blond brute who gets his comeuppance from every man, woman and child who crosses his path, the Cartoon Network, which is owned by the Turner Broadcasting System and has its headquarters in Atlanta, is solidifying its image as a bastion of novelty. It is also putting the finishing touches on its own animation studio in Burbank, Calif., and has committed $450 million to the development of new programs over the next five years.

''That's like Cartoon Network's whole philosophy,'' said Craig McCracken, the creator of ''The Powerpuff Girls.'' ''If you have a passion, they want you to be in charge of the project.''

Mr. McCracken's series, which made its debut in November 1998, is the first among equals in the Cartoon Network's video cabinet of prides and joys. ''The Powerpuff Girls'' is the most popular original series on the channel, its tongue-in-cheekiness reflecting the tone of many of the network's new offerings, a sensibility that goes in heavily for the sort of playful satire that can appeal as much to a viewer of 37 as 7.

The girls of the title are three candy-colored sisters, Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup, who were conceived in the laboratory of Professor Utonium. He mixed together sugar, spice and everything nice. Accidentally some of the mysterious Chemical X splashed in, and presto! a trio of 5-year-old superheros were soon enrolled in kindergarten at Pokey Oaks elementary school. The girls constantly do battle with postmodern villains, whether it is the school rich kid, poisoning the educational atmosphere with an outsize sense of entitlement, or a gigantic, marauding inflatable fish that shakes their hometown, Townsville, right down to the foundations of the Kosherama food store and the shops of Little Tokyo (a homage, of course, to Japanese monster flicks).

Mr. McCracken, who trained in an animation program financed by Disney at the California Institute of the Arts, said he wanted to follow in the tradition of children's programs that tickled adults. ''When I was a kid, my favorite show was the Adam West 'Batman,' '' he said. ''But my parents would sit there and laugh, and I never understood what was funny until I got a little older. So I wanted to make a show like that, that kids could watch on an action level: the core concept is 'cuteness and toughness.' ''

Like Mr. McCracken, most of the animators the Cartoon Network works with -- the vast majority in this male-dominated field are men -- learned the basics in art or film school. Often, the network, with 168 cartoon hours a week to fill and an insatiable appetite for inventory, commissions short works by artists whom it sometimes goes back to with an offer of a series.

The relationships deepen so quickly because animation, for all its increased visibility, remains out on the show-biz fringe. Calling a work in another medium ''cartoonish,'' after all, is still generally a pejorative; a form so steeped in silliness is always likely to have trouble being taken seriously. ''No matter how great the work gets,'' Ms. Simensky said, ''it still always ranks somewhere below game shows.''

Among the network's younger generation of animators, though, one does not sense much insecurity. In the digs of ''Sheep in the Big City,'' a recently refurbished suite in a building on Broadway just south of Houston Street, the gregarious Mr. Willems proudly led a tour of the various departments in which the series is getting sheep-shape.

''The key to animation, the art of it, is that if you can make a character seem to 'think,' to be able to get some emotional reaction, it's magic,'' he said, sitting in the editing room with his colleague, the series producer, Kris Greengrove.

''Sheep in the Big City'' is the network's first attempt to sustain a half hour with a single story; the other original programs are made up of shorter cartoons. The new series has a large cast -- about 40 voices an episode -- and is imbued with the kind of twisted humor used by Jay Ward in the old ''Rocky and Bullwinkle'' and ''Fractured Fairy Tales.'' In the pilot, Sheep leaves Farmer John's spread after discovering that a rogue military officer, General Specific, is looking for just the right sheep to use as fodder for a new weapon. Sheep, whose only dialogue is an occasional plaintive ''Baa,'' hightails it to the city, where he knows no one but still manages to outwit his pursuers.

Children may groove on the chase; grown-ups will intuit the influences of Monty Python and a century's worth of theater of the absurd. ''It's about being an outsider, about being alone and making it in the world,'' Mr. Willems said. (Not coincidentally, the pilot ends with Sheep in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, tossing his fleece in the air, a la Mary Richards.)

In the editing room, behind Mr. Willems, a primitive drawing of the Ranting Swede, a character who appears at the end of each episode and delivers a nonsensical diatribe, flashed across a computer screen. Mr. Willems smiled reflexively at the image, a portrait of an artist getting a kick out of a playground of his own design.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 16, 2000, on Page 2002031 of the National edition with the headline: TELEVISION/RADIO; Now Mom and Dad Are Going Cartoon-Crazy, Too. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe